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Last Updated: 07 May 2013

Mojibake (aka "junk text") is a horrible affliction that most computing in Japanese have encountered at some point.  Here are some simple fixes that I use with Microsoft Windows and Outlook.  These instructions are written with Windows 7 / Outlook 2010 in mind.

Read more: Computing in Japanese - Dealing with Mojibake

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Last Updated: 10 April 2013

* In Outlook, click your calendar.
* Click the View tab, Change View.
* Change to a List view.
* Sort the list by end date.
* Highlight old past events and delete them.

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Last Updated: 30 April 2014

In the hopes of reducing my monthly smartphone bill, I've been investigating the current state of VoIP and its potential to completely replace the traditional mobile phone.  I made a list of just about every free calling app/service I found on the iPhone app store.

Specifically, I was looking for a VoIP service boasting these features:
* Inbound phone number, particularly a Japan phone number (e.g. 050...)
* Call recording - not a must-have, but would be nice for when I crank-call friends in the USA

Here are my snap impressions and notes I made during my research.

Read more: The Hunt for the Ultimate Free Calling App

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Last Updated: 27 March 2013

After changing website templates I found that all instances of the <ul> html tag (used for bullets) no longer worked because the new template requires a class tag for its typography (e.g. <ul class="gkBullet2">).  Apparently this is common when using templates by Gavick.

So I wanted to find a quick way to replace all instances of <ul> with <ul class="gkBullet2">.  Here's what worked for me.  Go into PHPMyAdmin and execute these 2 queries:

update joomla_content set `introtext` = replace(`introtext`, '<ul>', '<ul class="gkBullet2">')

update joomla_content set `fulltext` = replace(`fulltext`, '<ul>', '<ul class="gkBullet2">')

Change "joomla" to whatever DB prefix you use.

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Last Updated: 25 February 2021

I've been a hard-core Untangle fan for several years now, but I recently wanted to explore other firewall options.  Being wrapped around a commercial product, Untangle charges money for its high-end features.  However, I figured since most all those features are covered by the open source community, there must be non-commercial options out there.  I began my hunt for the best free firewall.  I scoured the internet, downloading any and all offerings from 2 principal types of entities: 1. companies with an open source community branch or free non-trial version, and 2. open source community projects ("free as in speech" or free software / paid support biz models).

I tried just about every ISO I could get my hands on.  I thought I had my work cut out for me since I found far more of them than I had expected.  But I did notice some common themes--several of them seemed to share common ancestors / packages (e.g. Squid, Debian, FreeBSD, etc).  Here's a list of what I found along with my impressions.

Read more: The Hunt For the Ultimate Free Open Source Firewall Distro